Amygdala: Pros and Cons

Your amygdala is part of your brain. Part of your lizard brain. The part that tells you to run away from fire and to be afraid of the dark. It's the cave man of your brain, from back in the day when we weren't on top of the food chain. The part of your brain that instantaneously recognizes the horrible gurgling noise emanating from your child's throat and all it's terrible ramifications. Even if it's your first child and you have no previous experience with children, your amaygdala knows what that sound is. It receives the sound of it from your auditory system, checks your personal data base for matches, recognizes and prioritizes it against its list of potential dangers to you, then sends out a shit load of orders to every part of your body faster than the fastest supercomputer could ever dream of. You should be proud of your amygdala.

Unfortunately, as fast as your brain is, as fast as you think you are, the likelihood of you succeeding in whatever split second plan you've come up with to keep your child's puke off of you and everything around you is going to fail. Nine times out of ten. I've gotten lucky a few times. Today was not one of those times. Or two of those times. Or three. It's been a long afternoon. Bern came close. Hat's off. I saw it coming from the comfort of the living room. Xbox controller in one hand, cold drink in the other I figured I'd gotten lucky. Cherries and some type of mixed fruit drink. Wasn't pretty but at least it was in the kitchen. That would have been nasty on the carpet.

Liam and Connor both caught whatever it was I brought home from work this weekend. Connor's doing pretty good but Liam... Liam was trying to set a record. I stopped putting on new shirts at some point. Probably when I ran out of shirts to put on. It was quite the show. Water and plegm vomit. Apple juice and plegm vomit. Banana yoghurt and plegm vomit. I got lucky with the water one since we'd taken him outside to cool down a little. Really lucky, because that was an astounding amount of vomit.

Whatever it was, it seems to be out of his system now. Somewhere in the middle of an episode of Toopy and Binoo he perked up and started talking again. Not sure what he said since he was pretty sleepy by then, but I'm sure it was something like, "Jesus, Dad, you stink!"